Marchand Woman

by Brian Garfield

  “Including a United States Ambassador. Doesn’t that mean anything?”

  “Of course it does. But it’s an awkward situation—”

  “Awkward situation. Good Christ.”

  “Carole, there simply isn’t a hell of a lot we can do about it right now. Our hands are tied, on top of which we’re blindfolded.”

  He stubbed out the cigarette and looked at his watch again, strapped it to his wrist, and collected the shirt from its hanger. Howard’s once athletic physique had been worn down by an unstable and lazy personality; he was no longer trim but neither was he a wreck.

  He buttoned it, top to bottom, and reached for his tie. “I don’t know what else to tell you. Does any of this help? I don’t see how it could. I don’t know about you but I feel just as much in the dark as I did this morning.”

  She realized the extent of the difficulty with which he was keeping up the calm front. He had to knot the tie three times before he got it right; by the end of the performance he was reduced to oaths and savage jerks at the fabric.

  She felt a residue of affection toward him. It was not any wish for reconciliation—too much blood had flowed under the bridge—but she felt sorrow for him and it made her soften her tone when she spoke. “Of course there’s one thing you haven’t told me.”

  He was distributing things in his pockets. “Don’t be silly.”

  “Of course there is, Howard. I’m not an absolute fool. You don’t kidnap people for ransom and leave the delivery date wide open. There’s a deadline, isn’t there?”

  His hands became still. His eyes closed briefly, his lips worked and finally he said, “Today’s Tuesday. They want the money and the release of the eleven political prisoners by Friday noon. Two and a half days from now.”

  “Thank you,” she said quietly. She got up to leave. “I do wish you’d make some attempt to make things a bit easier for me. Do you think I enjoy prying things from you with a crowbar?”

  “I didn’t want to upset you—”

  “Upset me? As if I weren’t already distraught, you mean? Didn’t it occur to you that knowing there’s a finite limit to this suspense might be preferable to dragging out the agony indefinitely?”

  “I’m sorry.” He actually sounded miserable. “I’m truly sorry. I didn’t think.”

  “Please think next time. Don’t keep things from me—it’s cruel.”

  His hands gestured—helpless, apologetic.

  “I won’t keep you,” she said. “You’ll miss your plane.”

  “I’ll keep you posted.”

  “Will you,” she said drily. “I’ll be in Washington tomorrow afternoon—at the Hay-Adams if they’re not booked up.”

  “There’s no need for that.”

  “Isn’t there? I don’t see where I’ve got much choice, do you?”

  “I don’t suppose there’d be any point in my asking you to trust me.”

  “It’s a little late for that.”

  It made him wince. “I deserved that, I guess. All right. Do you want to stay at the house—would it be more comfortable than a hotel?”

  “God no.” She went.

  The stewardess came down the aisle looking at laps to make certain of the fastenings of seat belts; a man’s twangy voice scratched from the loudspeakers, something about cruising altitude and the landmarks over which they were destined to pass—landmarks that doubtless would be invisible through the clouds below. A junior stewardess who looked no more than sixteen was demonstrating the use of a yellow oxygen mask and the lap-belt inspector was asking if Carole wanted a drink after take-off—Carole had to ask her to repeat the question.

  She hated planes: the stale air redolent of tobacco smoke and kerosene, the immobile imprisonment at six hundred miles an hour, the way even first-class seats had been designed with not quite enough leg room.

  With her eyes shut and her head vibrating against the white paper antimacassar she sipped Dewar’s and drifted in thought. The mad hurry of the morning recycled itself through her mind—Mort Kyle walking her to her car at noon: “Don’t feel you have to rush back for God’s sake. If you’re still in Washington I’ll ship the final cut there and you can screen it at the AFI.”

  At the car she had stopped to fish for her keys, only half listening to him; she’d said abruptly, “How do you make contact with gangsters?”

  He was taken aback. She said, “I’m serious.”

  It made him show his teeth. “You walk into any studio in town and ask to see the head man.”

  “You’ve dealt with the Mafia, I know you have. Nobody can produce pictures in this industry without knowing them.”

  “What are you after?”

  “I don’t know. Desperation, I suppose. I want to hire a tarnished knight to go into the jungle and rescue my son. Does it sound imbecilic?”

  “To tell the truth yes, it does, if only because you don’t even know what jungle to look in.”

  “There was that private eye who rescued Marlon’s son.…”

  “I know what he’d tell you. He’d tell you to forget it.”

  “I’ve got to do something.”

  “There’s nothing. You’re doing all you can. As for gangsters, I know some of the union people. They’d hardly do you any good.”

  It had been a far-fetched impulse—a fantasy of panic. Now she remembered it with rue.

  Warren would have known what to do. She thought of him infrequently now—he’d died more than two years ago trying to rescue a charred Rhodesian family from a napalmed hut. Her brother had been as quixotic as her son was; she thought it must be something in the genes. She wondered if she had it too.

  He’d had a great importance in her life. She’d relied on her brother although it was quite possible he’d never known of it. It was a thing of the spirit—merely knowing Warren was alive, knowing he was her brother, knowing he’d come if she needed him: There’d been equilibrium in that.

  Warren the intellectual adventurer: Right now he’d have been hiring a helicopter or galvanizing forces or interviewing jungle natives to find the terrorists’ hideout. He’d have known where to look, whom to recruit, how to handle it. Warren Marchand—brilliant journalist, compassionate missionary of the spirit, troubled activist. For months she’d grieved his passing. She’d kept a scrapbook of his dispatches from Beirut and Saigon and Johannesburg and Salisbury and Belfast—Warren the eclectic adventurer. Her inscribed copy of his first book was nearly worn off its bindings: Published in 1965 and nearly everything he’d predicted for Viet Nam had come to pass.

  He’d free-lanced for the high-paying magazines; not a reporter really—it was his observations for which they’d paid him. You read a Marchand article not for facts but for truths: He showed you the flavor and the significance of things.

  Every six months or so he’d appear on her doorstep—the quick Marchand grip and she’d drop anything, cancel any date, to go out to dinner with him and catch up on the latest chapter of his picaresque life. He’d been Robert’s favorite, of course; possibly it was Warren’s example that had inspired Robert to join the Peace Corps.

  The genes, she thought. The same good genes in Robert had overcome the rotten upbringing. The custody fight had ended in uneasy truce after the ludicrous kidnapings and spiritings about: A split-custody agreement by which Robert spent much of the year in boarding school and divided his vacations scrupulously between them.

  Robert. Not Bob, never Bobby, but Robert. Robert Lundquist. Robert Warren Lundquist. She was still counting on him. He’d have to get out of it, she needed him too much for him to let her down.

  Thursday she haunted the telephones and spent half the afternoon sitting stonily before Howard’s desk browbeating him with silent baleful looks. She badgered him into making constant phone calls: State Intelligence, the CIA, even someone at the White House.

  There was nothing. No one knew whether the Latin American governments planned to accede or hang tough. No one knew who the guerrillas were or where the hosta
ges were held. There was no further ransom demand; no word at all from the terrorists.

  “The deadline,” she kept saying, “is noon tomorrow,” and watched it annoy him.

  Midafternoon—the Latin American desks began to send copies of reports into Howard’s office. There were rivalries among Mexico, Venezuela and Colombia; things were bogged down in maddeningly trivial disputes; it looked as if the three governments might fail to reach agreement on a policy of dealing with the demands. Mexico and Colombia favored paying the ransom; Venezuela, taking a hard line, looked as if it would refuse to negotiate, let alone pay.

  She screamed at him and he bolted upright from his chair, shouting at her: “Do you think I’m any less frustrated than you are? Do you think I like feeling impotent to do anything about it?”

  She waited for him to breathe; she said with dead calm, “I want to see somebody in the CIA. Somebody high up. You can arrange it.”

  “If you think those guys will tell you a damn thing you’re out of your mind.”

  “You make the appointment. I’ll do the interviewing.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Now, Howard. Do it now.” She was unrelenting.

  He sat severely behind a desk beneath the official photographic portrait of the President. The desk looked to be mahogany. The man wore a checked bow tie on a starched white shirt and wore his salt-and-pepper hair in sleek fingerwaves; his glasses had rectangular lenses and thin white-gold frames and he had the look of an aging matinee idol with a second-string touring road-company. His name was O’Hillary.

  She knew how she must appear to him—a slender woman, very tense with eyes hungry for information; and rather a bit helpless. She was not above lying, not above playing a role; she was not above anything.

  She said, “I had an appointment with a Mr. Ryerson but they told me he’d been taken suddenly busy and couldn’t see me.”

  “I know. A harmless lie. Sit down, Mrs. Lundquist. Actually, George Ryerson farmed you out to me because I’m dealing with this Mexican mess. By coming here you’ve avoided the middleman, so it’s not really a runaround we’ve given you.”

  She said, “What’s being done about my son?”

  The man ran a palm over his head carefully, not dislodging the neat wave in his hair. “I’m sure your ex-husband’s told you everything he could.”

  “Howard’s part of this bureaucracy of yours and possibly that explains why he has faith that everything possible is being done. I’m sorry to be blunt but I want to know what’s going on.”

  “We’re doing all we can. Surely you must believe that.”

  “Specifically what does that consist of?”

  “At the moment it consists of a massive attempt on numerous different fronts to acquire information. We can’t make any moves while we’re blind. You can understand that.”

  “Do you know where they are? The hostages?”

  “No. No idea.”

  “Do you know who the terrorists are?”

  “We have suspicions but not facts. We believe they may be a splinter group of anti-Castro Cuban exiles—left over, so to speak, from the Bay of Pigs days. Determined to foment the overthrow of the Castro government. We’ve sent investigators—most of them from the Federal Bureau of Investigation—into south Florida to find out what they can from the members of the Cuban community there. At this point in time they’ve been able to shed no light on this. I can’t really tell you any more than that.”

  “What do the governments plan to do—the Mexicans and the others?”

  “About meeting the demands? They’re still arguing the point among themselves.”

  “And Washington has nothing to say about this?”

  “I’m sure the normal pressures have been applied, Mrs. Lundquist. That’s out of my department.”

  He made a point of looking at his watch.

  She said, “It’s kind of you to grant me this time. I realize you’ve only done it because somebody somewhere must owe a favor to my ex-husband, but I appreciate it all the same.”

  “Please feel free to call on me at any time.”

  She didn’t rise from the chair. “Mr. O’Hillary. I know you’ve been less than candid with me. I know it’s inevitable—it’s the way you are, the way you operate, it’s ingrained. Information is doled out on a need-to-know basis and I, as a sideline noncombatant, don’t need to know anything at all from the official point of view. But I think you know a great deal that you haven’t told me and if I find out later that this was the case I intend to make a noise. I have a certain amount of clout myself, particularly with the press, and I’m capable of making a rather loud noise. It seems to me your agency is under quite a cloud already these days—I’m sure you want to avoid any further embarrassments if you can. Am I making some sort of sense to you?”

  “What do you want? Truth or pretense? The truth is we don’t know where those people are, Mrs. Lundquist.”

  “The truth but not the whole truth. Tell me this: If you did know where they were, what would you be doing about it?”

  Her statement dangled like a baited hook. She saw O’Hillary begin to smile; she’d caught him out—he hadn’t credited her with enough cleverness.

  She said after a moment, “You probably wouldn’t do a damn thing. Very possibly you know exactly who these Cubans are and where they’re hiding. But they’re on our side, aren’t they?”

  O’Hillary cocked his head a bit to one side; the quizzical hint of a smile didn’t change. He seemed to be waiting for a rider to her statement.

  She said, “For all I know they have your tacit support. Even possibly your active support.”

  “Kidnaping an American Ambassador? Hardly.” O’Hillary folded his arms across his chest—a blatant indication of rejection, both of the accusation and of Carole. “You’re quite wrong.”

  “If this were a scenario for a Hollywood movie,” she said, “and I were reading it as the director, I’d have to ask the screenwriter why the secret agents aren’t doing the standard secret-agent things. Why haven’t you made it clear to these terrorists that if any harm befalls these important American hostages, then the CIA will spare no expense to track down these animals, wherever in the world they may choose to hide, and exterminate them?”

  “Gunboat diplomacy of that sort went out quite a while ago, Mrs. Lundquist. I understand your feelings very well. One of the hostages in that party happens to be a fairly good friend of mine. I’m keenly concerned for him, just as you are for your son. But I’ve had to learn, painfully over the years, that indignation is a pointless response to terrorism.”

  “Is it? I’m not sure of that. Maybe I’m not jaded enough.”

  “This would hardly be an appropriate time to beat our breasts and thunder threats of retribution against these Cubans. They’d only laugh at us—at best—or start murdering hostages to prove their seriousness. That’s what we’re trying to avoid. We’re keeping a very low profile on this, but it’s not for lack of keen concern.”

  His unflappability unnerved her; she controlled herself rigidly, realizing that her anger put her at a disadvantage against O’Hillary’s cool dispassion. She knew there had to be a better way to handle this. Warren would have known how. She said, “Don’t you people keep tabs on these Cuban counterrevolutionary groups?”

  “That’s classified.”

  “Of course you do. And if you’ve been keeping tabs on them you must have known something was in the wind. Possibly even known about this kidnaping before it took place. And if you knew about it why didn’t you put a stop to it?”

  “How?”

  The single word seemed to reveal the extent of O’Hillary’s knowledge. She hated him then.

  He stood up. “I really must get back to work, Mrs. Lundquist. The minute anything breaks we’ll be in touch with your ex-husband. I’m afraid there’s nothing further I can tell you. Except perhaps this. I think you credit us with far more power in the world than we possess. We’re talking a
bout Cuban terrorists who committed a crime in Mexico, managed to involve two other Latin American governments, and probably are hiding out somewhere between Durango and Rio de Janeiro. Only in the most indirect sense is this an American affair. We can’t dictate policy to the government of Venezuela, no matter what the pundits may suggest—anyone who follows the ups and downs of OPEC policies knows that much. We simply don’t rule the world. You need to understand that. Even if we did, as long as totalitarian solutions are unacceptable, then problems like this one will not be solved.”

  He held out his hand to shake hers; he said with a smooth smile and a soft cadence in his voice, “‘Be wary of what you desire—you’ll get it.’ Emerson, I believe.”

  It was one of those impressive curtain lines you spoke as you went out the door; O’Hillary wasn’t leaving, but he turned away from her and walked toward a filing cabinet.

  There was nothing left to be said and she saw no point in spoiling his contrived finale. She left his office and, on her way past the secretary’s desk, glanced at the girl’s intercom. The On button was depressed. Either the secretary had taken the conversation down or she’d taped it.

  Carole, unsurprised, waited for the guard to escort her to the elevator. She felt neither anger nor disappointment; she felt drained.

  She awoke conscious of having dreamed—something fearful that left her short of breath—but she could not recover it.

  She’d left a wake-up call for eight; it was seven-twenty. Friday.

  Sitting bolt upright she said, “Robert?”

  She arrived ahead of public visiting hours and was forced to wait on the Twenty-first Street entrance, fuming while she cooled her heels on the sidewalk. The State Department building was modern and massive, seven stories, heavy with import but not with style. After two minutes of it she could stand it no longer. She found a public phone.

  Despite everything the telephone company could do she finally reached Howard. “Tell the bastards to let me in.”

  Thus armed she got past the guard. The receptionist signed her in; she made her way to the familiar cubicle. It wasn’t much—a partitioned roomlet in government green.